Staff and students are assigned an Email address and a FirstClass account when they commence at the UCO. It is a condition of working for or studying at the UCO that employees and students make use of this method of communication.

The School considers your FirstClass Email address to be your primary Email address.

However, FirstClass is not just a simple Email system and the UCO does not only use personal Email to communicate with staff or students; various electronic noticeboards and discussion areas (in addition to a personal Email account) are provided to you via the FirstClass suite of software.

Sometimes students, and staff, mistakenly think that FirstClass is simply an Email system.Having first made this mistake they then wrongly expect it to communicate only via Email such that every attempt to communicate with them should arrive in their personal Mailbox. Instead, FirstClass pre-groups communication into Conferences (or Forums). This has the advantage that all Emails about a particular type of activity are located in the same container and not mixed up with Emails about other subjects - as invariably occurs in a user Mailbox within a simple Email system. FirstClass also supports threading, which automatically groups Emails on the same topic together, and thereby reduces the need to create Folders.

Since the functionality of FirstClass is primarily achieved by the use of Conferences (or Forums) or group discussion areas, one cannot “use” FirstClass by requesting it to forward all relevant Emails to you at some other email address. Your fellow colleagues, working or studying in a similar role to yourself, have been allocated a Forum for sharing relevant information and for electronic discussions. Prior to FirstClass, a lot of information was posted on Notice Boards. When FirstClass was adopted, electronic notice boards were used as a superior way to communicate with students since they could be viewed from wherever a student happened to access FirstClass, and did not require the student to come to a specific place to view the notice board.

Please use the following link for further information about FirstClass: